I am sad to be giving such a low rating to this book because I felt it had great potential. As always, the opinion below reflects solely my own personal reading experience.

Rising Tide had a great premise; unfortunately, it didn’t meet my expectations. I still think the concepts and ideas were interesting, and it’s such a shame that I haven’t enjoyed this book as much as I thought I would.

The main issues for me would be:

I. Lack of clear direction;

II. Timeline and type of narrative.

And I will explain these further.

I. Lack of clear direction

Rising Tide takes place in a dystopian world. But is this a character-driven, a conflict-based, or even setting-based story? Even though the synopsis suggests a conflict-based story, my answer after having read the book is: I don’t know – which is not a positive thing since most of the time it should be pretty clear. I am aware not every reader out there is going to analyze the type of story you are telling, as long as of course, you’ve caught their interest and kept things moving. Unfortunately, I felt that nothing was truly happening or moving in this story. Surely, many things had happened in the past, and several flashbacks are there to make sure we know that. However, flashbacks don’t make a story. We want the story to move forward, but what the flashbacks and all those inner monologues do is to provide backstory and info-dump. The sad part is that this book had enough concepts and material to explore so many different directions, and I felt it got lost in them. Lorel, or even Mello, had enough backstory and inner struggles to make this a character-driven story. On the other hand, the main conflict Sirens VS Corporation / Divinity (I loved the depth of the metaphor while being it literal at the same time) would be enough to keep the plot moving. Even a story based on the setting (the awesome dystopian world Zalecki created) could work. Instead, we have too much of everything, and an incredibly slow pace.

II. Timeline and type of narrative

This is a multi-POV, third person limited narrative. Shallow POV has been used as opposed to deeper POV, which I felt it contributed to the distance created between characters and reader. Lorel’s character, for example, had great potential to become a pretty relatable character. Still, I didn’t feel attached to her or any of the characters at any point. I didn’t feel her pain, I didn’t connect to her, it didn’t make me feel anything.

Each chapter had a timestamp, which I thought it was pretty redundant, considering the fact that within that chapter, we would still have flashbacks or mentions of the past. I usually like stories that do not follow a linear timeline, but in this case, all these jumps in time made me lose my interest.

The world building, again, had so much potential, but the way it had been introduced to us was through backstory, flashbacks, and info-dump.

Overall, Rising Tide didn’t work for me, but this doesn’t mean that others won’t be able to enjoy it.